This is the ultimate room-service dish after a long flight

The dish

Club sandwich, US

Club sandwich with fries … the perfect post-plane meal.Credit: The Cosmopolitan/Dominic Lorrimer

Plate up

Quick – you’ve just got the menu for hotel room service, or maybe the swim-up bar, and you need to decide. You’re jet-lagged, you’re tired, you’re hungry and you just want some food. What’s it going to be? The answer, for so many of us, is a club sandwich. This is a hotel menu staple across the world, a reliably solid, tasty choice on a list of potential pitfalls and stomach-unsettlers.

This dish is so familiar that it barely needs description. For those somehow out of the loop, though, a club sandwich is a toasted, three-layer monster laden with chicken (or turkey), bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. It’s often served with fries on the side and is almost always held together with little cocktail sticks. Jet lag, be gone.

First serve

Some say the club sanger originated at the Union Club in New York City in the late 19th century, though the recipe there only refers to two toasted pieces of bread with turkey or chicken. More likely it evolved at the Saratoga Club, a notorious casino in New York State, in about 1894. There’s also the classic story that an unnamed man arrived home late one night and put together a sandwich with the ingredients at hand, and the club was born.

What we know for sure, however, is that it wasn’t always a triple-decker. Legendary American food writer James Beard once wrote: “Nowadays the sandwich is bastardised because it is usually a three-decker, which is not authentic (whoever started that horror should be forced to eat three-deckers three times a day for the rest of his life)”.

Order there

In New York City, the legendary grill restaurant JG Melon – open since 1972 – is the place to go for a turkey club (jgmelon-nyc.com).

Order here

For the classic club sandwich experience here, head to a hotel. In Sydney, the Park Hyatt does a mean club at The Living Room (parkhyattsydney.com). In Melbourne, the Sofitel on Collins is your spot (sofitel.accor.com). The Sofitel in Brisbane is also excellent.

One more thing

There’s an underrated theory that the “club” in club sandwich is an acronym: Chicken and Lettuce Under Bacon. Sadly, it’s not true, given the sandwich emerged from American country clubs.